What’s new in Tasktop Integration Hub 18.4?

A new release of Tasktop Integration Hub is available today. Version 18.4 includes new prebuilt integration patterns for faster integration, point-and-click configuration of code traceability use cases for Git-based repositories, and support for Trello, a project management and collaboration tool from Atlassian. 18.4 also includes features that further minimize repository load when Tasktop scans for new and updated artifacts.

Prebuilt Integration Patterns

For over a decade, Tasktop has been working with some of the largest enterprises in the world to integrate their best-of-breed DevOps toolchains. We’ve compiled and published a library of integration patterns that application delivery teams commonly implement to accelerate time-to-market and remove waste from their processes.

Now, we’re starting to make those integration patterns available from within Tasktop Integration Hub, to speed up integration setup. If you know the use case you’re trying to achieve, starting from an integration pattern can save you some steps.

Version 18.4 includes two new prebuilt integration patterns for code traceability use cases, detailed in the following section.

New Point-and-Click Use Case: Code Traceability

When dealing with millions of lines of code, it’s very important to know why the code was written in the first place. In fact, when developing safety critical products or products designed for decades of use and maintenance, this is absolutely critical. However, manually linking code changes to the originating feature or defect is both tedious and error prone.

New Product Support: Trello

Trello is a project management tool that uses boards, lists, and cards to help organize and prioritize projects. Thanks to Trello’s simplicity, many software delivery organizations adopt it as the project command center. That said, the detailed work to complete the project is often carried out by many practitioners working in several purpose-fit tools to maximize their own productivity.

For that reason, Tasktop now flows new cards and updates to cards between Trello and all the other tools in your software delivery toolchain. The seamless flow of data eliminates the waste and overhead endemic in project management and cross-team collaboration, including duplicate data entry, status meetings and chasing down information.

Trello is commonly integrated with “downstream” tools used by product managers, developers, testers and release managers to implement the details of a project. Here’s a short demo video for a sample use case integrating Trello with GitLab.

Also in Version 18.4

Tasktop Integration Hub comes with an embedded database (Derby) for demo and evaluation purposes. Starting with 18.4, a new warning banner appears when a proper operational database has not been configured. The message will disappear once Tasktop Integration Hub is configured with an operational database like Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL or Oracle.

Periodically, Tasktop runs full scans on repositories to detect changes that did not cause the artifact’s ‘last modified date’ to change. In version 18.4, Tasktop can now determine whether these full scans are required and conduct them only if necessary based on the repository’s known behavior and the fields you are synchronizing. The behavior is documented at length here.

ServiceNow’s London release provides a richer Agile Development product (previously called SDLC), which also supports SAFe. Tasktop Integration Hub supports this new SAFe module since its release in September. Check out our demo video and blog.

Version 18.4 supports Jira’s new authentication method for Jira Cloud, which uses API Tokens. Upgrading to version 18.4 now means you will experience no disruption of service when the old authentication method will be deprecated.